This section is intended to provide a background or context to the invention that is recited in the claims. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived, implemented or described. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description and claims in this application.
In wireless communication, different collections of communication protocols are available to provide different types of services and capabilities. The long term evolution (LTE) is one of such collection of wireless communication protocols that extends and improves the performance of existing UMTS (universal mobile telecommunications system) protocols and is specified by different releases of the standard by the 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) in the area of mobile network technology.
Of interest herein are the further releases of 3GPP LTE targeted towards future international mobile telephony-advanced (IMT-A) systems, referred to herein for convenience simply as LTE-Advanced (LTE-A). A goal of LTE-A is to provide significantly enhanced services by means of higher data rates and lower latency with reduced cost. LTE-A is directed toward extending and optimizing the cureent 3GPP LTE radio access technologies to provide higher data rates at very low cost. LTE-A will be a more optimized radio system fulfilling the international telecommunication union radiocommucation sector (ITU-R) requirements for IMT-A while maintaining backward compatibility with the current LTE release.
One specification of interest is 3GPP TS 36.101 V11.1.0 (2012-06) Technical Specification 3rd Generation Partnership Project; Technical Specification Group Radio Access Network; Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access (E-UTRA); User Equipment (UE) radio transmission and reception (Release 10), which is incorporated by reference herein in its entirety and referred to for simplicity hereafter as 36.101.